William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and the author, most recently, of The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Blog Entries by William Easterly

Who is the Target Audience for Celebrity Aid Campaigns?

1 Comments | Posted August 13, 2009 | 03:35 PM (EST)


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I've complained a lot about celebrity aid campaigns, but somebody must like them since they keep happening over and over. To whom is the celebrity campaign meant to appeal?

The celebrity aid campaign of the past few years has precisely these three components:

1....

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The Skip Gates Arrest May Not Have Been About Race -- But About Something Even Worse

431 Comments | Posted July 27, 2009 | 12:41 PM (EST)


Is there a non-racial explanation for why the Cambridge MA police department would arrest Skip Gates for breaking into his own home, and then continue to insist after a huge outcry that they did the right thing?

My guess is that Sergeant James Crowley was following an inflexible rule...

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It's Over: The Tragedy of the Millennium Development Goals

10 Comments | Posted July 6, 2009 | 10:59 AM (EST)


The United Nations today issued its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Report 2009. To make a long story short, the accompanying press release says:

The assessment, launched today by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Geneva, warns that, despite many successes, overall progress has been too slow for most of the...
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Will US Army's Development Delusions Cause More Deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan?

10 Comments | Posted June 19, 2009 | 10:34 AM (EST)


The new 2009 US Aarmy Stability Operations Field Manual (available in a University of Michigan paperback as well as an earlier version online ) is remarkably full of utopian dreams of transforming other societies into oases of prosperity, peace, and democracy through the coordinated use of military force,...

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Amnesty International Confuses Poverty and Human Rights

2 Comments | Posted June 5, 2009 | 11:50 AM (EST)


The 2009 report of Amnesty International is blurring its previous clear focus on human rights to a fuzzy vision that now includes poverty:

So many people are living in utter destitution...As the global economic outlook appears more and more gloomy,hope lies in the ... determination of human rights...
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Back to Sachs: Astrology, Despotism, and Africa

15 Comments | Posted June 2, 2009 | 10:23 AM (EST)


Sachs Debate, Day Eight. Surprised that Sachs did not understand the point about Occam's Razor -- that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler. African poverty is complex, but our theories about it should not have so many complex Buts, Ors, and...

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Geography Lessons: Correcting Sachs on African Economic Development

9 Comments | Posted May 29, 2009 | 10:13 AM (EST)


Professor Jeffrey Sachs continues the debate on aid to Africa originally prompted by Dambisa Moyo's book Dead Aid. As usual, I will of course let Dr. Moyo defend herself against specific criticisms made by Sachs and his co-author John McArthur. But Sachs unveils such a strange geographic theory of...

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Sachs Ironies: Why Critics are Better for Foreign Aid than Apologists

13 Comments | Posted May 25, 2009 | 04:01 PM (EST)


Official foreign aid agencies delivering aid to Africa are used to operating with nobody holding them accountable for aid dollars actually reaching poor people. Now that establishment is running scared with the emergence of independent African voices critical of aid, such as that of Dambisa Moyo. Jeffrey Sachs, the world's...

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Bill Gates' Misguided Capitalism

Posted July 1, 2008 | 04:42 PM (EST)


This article is part of a series on "creative capitalism," a term used by Bill Gates to describe how market incentives can be used to better aid the world's poor. The Huffington Post is reprinting a number of these articles in collaboration with creativecapitalismblog.com, an Internet publishing experiment run...

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